After many years of using Linux I bought a MacBook Pro approximately six months ago. After my inital shock of having a new toy reality started to kick in and I wrote about my journey for picking a new laptop. At this point I have used the computer well more than enough to really compare it to my old friend Linux.
Interface
When I got my MacBook Pro my initial reaction was, how can I alter the interface to make it exactly how I thought it should be. I soon realized that this was nearly impossible without some third party software. This was truly shocking to me, at the time I could not understand why someone would build an operating system that did not allow you to change the look and feel of the GUI.
After the shock wore off I learned to live with the default interface. I was resistant to like it, I really wanted to hate it. Fairly quickly I started to ignore the interface all together, the color scheme no longer mattered. After a while the theme started to grow on me. Today I am at the point that I kind of like it. I do not miss it when an application does not use it, but it does not bother me if one does.
One of the items that I loved about Linux was the fact that every little detail was customizable. When it came to the interface you could run a variety of GUIs and you could tweak each one of them to your liking. The problem with this is that I started spending way too much time tweaking the settings of a few minuscule things. With OS X this is not even an option. It is really freeing to not even have to think about changing it. You can go about your daily work and it seems that every little detail has already been thought of and fixed for you.
This also means there is no xorg.conf file. I do not know how much time I have spent researching and tweaking this file to get hardware working exactly how I wanted it. In this file you can do anything from change the resolution options to tweaking the settings for a mouse. It is a massive text file that is so complex that I am happy to no longer think about it because everything on a Mac just works.
Software
I truly miss the free and open source software available on Linux. There are a few different
out there to work as a package manager to install this software on a Mac. The problem is that the software itself was not designed to work on a Mac and therefore have very sharp edges. I’ve found that I install software from these systems only to not use it.
The great software out there for OS X is not free. Almost everywhere you go you need to pay $20 for a something. I understand that these people are developing for a profit and they need to make money in order to continue to develop, but after so many years in the world of Linux it is quite a shock.
There is quite a bit of preinstalled software in OS X that is good for the average user. I’ve found myself only using one of these pieces of software, itunes. All of the other software was fun to play with for a little while, but had no actual value to my everyday computing. I see the use of most of this software to other people, but I’ve moved most of it off my hard drive to my file server.
I am still amazed at how software works on OS X. For the most part you can have an entire program inside a single location. For the uninitiated to the OS X world, when you install an application all you have to do is drag the program_name.app into your application directory. You do not even need to drag it into that directory for it to work, for the most part everything is inside that one container. There are expect ions to the rule for programs that tweak with operating system settings. These come in a program_installer.pkg and the install is very similar to a standard Windows installer.
The software management is simply ingeniously simple. You do not need a package manager to delete a normal package as everything is self contained. All you have to do is get rid of that one container and the software is gone.
Security
A common misconception about Macs is that they are more secure than Windows. Apple goes out of its way to hide security flaws rather than do the correct thing and admit the fault and fix it. For this reason most security experts dislike Apple. With these people not liking Apple they will not do the research to help OS X fix their problems. Instead quite a few of these people are still doing the research and then releasing them to the general public. This allows for people good and bad to use it.
Conclusion
With all of the negative things I’ve stated above I still would be hard pressed to give up my MacBook Pro. The computer just works and that is why I like it. If you want to compile your own software on it you can. If you want to run via command line you can as it is a UNIX variant. The computer is so powerful and yet simple to use. I’ve yet to find another system out there that puts these two things together so perfectly.
